Dr Mick Flanagan, Honorary Senior Lecturer in the Department of Electronic Engineering, is, since retiring, mainly active in pedagogic research on teaching and learning concepts in higher education. He maintains a lower level activity in the use of object-oriented programming in science and engineering modelling:

Mick Flanagan's research is centred on the examination of the role of the Meyer and Land pedagogic Threshold Concept in the teaching of electrical engineering at the undergaduate level, teaching programming languages to electrical engineering students and in the development of technology-enhanced learning (TEL) environments for continual professional development.

This research involves collaborations with Professor J H F Meyer, Professor of Education, Faculty of Engineering, Architecture and Information Technology, University of Queensland, on several aspects of teaching across engineering and related sciences and with Dr Jan Smith, Centre for Academic Practice, School of Edcation, Durham University, on the teaching of programming languages.

Mick Flanagan also is or has been a collaborator in:

The Royal Academy of Engineering / National HE STEM Programme Project, Uncovering threshold values in first year engineering courses and implications for curriculum design
Collaborators: Artemis Stamboulis (University of Birmingham), Caroline Baillie (Open University) and Mick Flanagan (UCL).

Birmingham University Centre for Learning and Academic Development (CLAD) Project, Threshold concept framework in engineering curriculum review and design and implicvation in enquiry based learning
Principlal investigator: Artemis Stamboulis (University of Birmingham).

The European Commission Seventh Framework Information and Communication Technologies Digital Libraries Project TARGET (Transformative, Adaptive, Responsive and enGaging EnvironmenT). The main objective of TARGET is the development of a virtual world serious game that will support rapid competence development in project management and project innovation. Threshold Concepts studies centred on project and innovation management conducted both within undergraduate and postgraduate courses of the academic partners and within the training departments of the industrial partners will inform the development of serious game scenarios.

Mick Flanagan was an overseas member of the reference panel for the Australian Learning and Teaching Council (ALTC) Project, Engineering thresholds: an approach to curriculum renewal, based at the University of Western Australia, Perth.

Some current perspectives on threshold concepts
Introductory Workshop led by
Flanagan, M.T. and Meyer, J.H.F.
at Improving Student Learning - For the 21st Century Learner, The 17th Improving Student Learning Symposium, Imperial College London, UK, 7-9 September 2009.

From playing to understanding: the transformative potential of discourse versus syntax in learning to program
M T Flanagan and J Smith
Threshold Concepts within the Disciplines Symposium
University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK, 30 August−1 September 2006Abstract of the presentation

A collaboration initiated by Professor Kishor Gulabivala, Head of Endodontology, UCL Eastman Dental Institute, on the application of impedance spectroscopy to the detection of root canal apices and to the diagnostics of root canal infections.

Error analysis of classical immunoassay formats, e.g. radioimmunoassay, has determined the most appropriate formats for a given application. However, it is not clear that the conclusions of classical immunoassay error analysis apply to all immunosensor formats. Models of immunosensors and Monte Carlo simulations of immunosensors have been developed to facilitate a rational design strategy and to determine the optimum immunoassay formats for immunosensor applications.

Several of the underpinning base classes have been translated from their original C++ format to Java and are documented in Flanagan's Java Scientific library, e.g.

This library also contains a class, ImmunoAssay, providing methods for fitting immunoassay data to the standard fitting equations, e.g. five parameter logistic function, for comparing the fitting to different standard equations and for obtaining the concentration of an analyte for a given assay response.

Mick Flanagan is an Honorary Senior Lecturer in the UCL Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering.

Mick Flanagan moved across the disciplines as his career progressed. He started his research career as a biochemist (BSc and PhD from the Biochemistry Department, University of Sheffield, England). He developed an interest in the design of instrumentation for biomedical applications during his PhD in which he was involved in the building a fluorescence lifetime and fluorescence polarisation monitoring instruments in studying protein binding sites. He then moved to the Biophysics and Optics Division of the UK National Institute for Medical Research (MRC NIMR), London, where he continued to work on the application of advanced spectroscopic instrumentation to biomedical research, e.g. the structure of influenza virus haemagglutinin. In addition, he became a member of the programming group developing packages for the analysis of biomedical data, e.g. the determination of antibody affinity distributions.

He left the NIMR to join International Telephone and Telegraph's (ITT's) newly formed Biosciences Group in their then Corporate Laboratory, STL at Harlow, England. The brief of this group was to look, in the long term, at the overlap of biology and electronics and where this overlap leads in the development of new devices or systems, and, in the short term, to develop medical and environmental sensors in which a biological molecule is incorporated into an electronic device, e.g.chemFETs.

In 1982 he moved to the Department of Electronic and Electrical Engineering at UCL where he continued both the bioelectronic research (e.g. spin-coated waveguides for immunosensors) and programming research (e.g. Markov processes in modelling complex immunochemical reactions). He also developed an interest in pedagogic research into teaching and learning concepts in higher education, especially in the value of the Meyer and Land threshold concept in analysing troublesome concepts in the teaching of programming languages and electronic engineering (see above). He has taught courses on nanotechnology and healthcare, object-oriented programming languages, procedural programming languages, programming for systems and control engineering, control theory, instrumentation, electromagnetic theory, biophysics for engineers and physicists and introductory electronics for chemists and biochemists.

He has served on several UK Research Council and the then UK Department of Trade and Industry (dti) committees concerned with molecular electronics, instrumentation and sensors.
He is the associate editor of the IET Nanobiotechnology Journal.

Flanagan, M. T. and Smith, J. (2006) From playing to understanding: the transformative potential of discourse versus syntax in learning to program
Threshold Concepts within the Disciplines Symposium, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, UK, 30 August−1 September 2006Abstract of the presentation